This is madness, obviously. If, as an author, you were hoping to see how quickly you could bury your reputation underneath a hail of brickbats, there couldn't be many better ways of setting about it than taking it upon yourself to write a PG Wodehouse sequel. The presumption! For what makes Wodehouse Wodehouse isn't the Edwardian setting, the dim-toff–and-clever-butler set-up or the chaotic plots: it's his sublime comic style, phrase by phrase and sentence by sentence. To bust out Jeeves and Wooster is no more than to put on your tennis whites; to do Wodehouse requires you then to play like Roger Federer.

In his author's note, Faulks comes at the problem in musical rather than tennis-playing terms. "I didn't want to write too close an imitation of that distinctive music for fear of sounding flat or sharp. Nor did I want to drift into parody," he writes, instead promising a "nostalgic variation – in which a memory of the real thing provides the tune and these pages perhaps a line of harmony". This sounds pretty but doesn't really get him off the hook one bit.

So, me? I was sharpening my brickbats – assuming that's what you do to prepare a brickbat for use. I could not conceive of how Faulks would end up with anything other than a pocket full of cash and a face full of egg. But you know what? It's not half bad. In fact, considering the Eiger he has assaulted, considering the delicacy of the souffle he is attacking with his spade, it's a pretty remarkable performance.

Faulks isn't usually a comic writer but he does have form as a parodist: he has an ear, and he uses it. He may have knocked out his Bond book in two months flat – and it showed signs of his having done so – but this reads as if a good deal more care has been taken. For my money he overdoes the Wodehousian definite article (usually as a replacement for a possessive article – "I felt a shudder run through the lower vertebrae"), but the voice of the novel is recognisably and pleasurably Wodehousian. Here's a paragraph by way of example:

"This June morning was no exception. Jeeves had made up for lost time at the local shops. The eggs had a pleasing orange glow and the bacon came from a beast far removed from the baleful husbandry of any Jude, obscure or otherwise. Yet despite the cloudless blue sky over Kingston St Giles, the day's task was a serious one, and I felt it would tax my resources to the last drop. Little did I know, as I set fire to an after-breakfast gasper in the cottage garden, what the lead-filled sock of fate had in store for me."

It's not as funny as Wodehouse – because what is? – but it is surefooted and diverting. The plot – the part of the whole shebang that Wodehouse himself, oddly, laboured over most – is just as twisty and absurd as you'd want. Cleaving carefully to the formula, Faulks gives us some knowing servants, some snobby members of the gentry, a pair of young ladies whose marital prospects are tied up with their inheritances, a good deal of well-intentioned but disastrous meddling, some set pieces including a cricket match and some village hall amateur dramatics, and the ever-circling threat of aunts.

When we meet Bertie, he is impersonating a gentleman's gentleman while Jeeves – enjoying his tenancy of Bertie's best dressing gown – is impersonating that gentleman's gentleman's gentleman (which gentleman, to confuse things further, is not B Wooster).

Where the tone goes wrong – and it does so only occasionally – is when Faulks can't resist a shade of the sort of pathos that the originals are immune to. Jeeves mentions a distant relative whose cricketing career ended with the first world war, for instance:

"'The battle of the Somme, sir. He was in C Company of the 15th Royal Warwicks. The assault on High Wood.'

"'Bad show,' said Woody.

"It was quiet for a moment; you could hear the rooks chattering in the elms and cedars."

That's the voice of Faulks, not of Wodehouse. In Bertie's connection with the romantic lead, Georgiana – with whom he had flirted on the Cote d'Azur before the action of the novel starts – there is more at stake emotionally, too, than is quite in keeping with Wodehouse's precedent. He'll lose some fans there, no question: Wodehouse is as kindly as sunshine, but he's never sentimental.

Still, credit to old Faulks. I'd like to see someone try to do this better.